Salesforce.com Software Review – Is It Right for Your Business?

Salesforce.com Software Review – Is It Right for Your Business?

Salesforce.com has clearly demonstrated its leadership in the hosted customer relationship management (CRM) space.

The company’s success – which many experts attribute to the shortcomings of early-generation server-based CRM offerings – has been quite impressive. In just seven short years, Salesforce.com has earned a strong foothold in the industry, and built a solid customer base of more than 550,000 subscribers at over 27,000 sites.

Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by Mark Benioff, a former Oracle executive who revolutionized the use of the Web for the delivery of enterprise applications. This on-demand approach is what gave Salesforce.com its competitive edge.

Customers began turning to Salesforce.com solutions to avoid the long, complex implementations and expensive, time-consuming maintenance associated with on-site CRM packages. Salesforce.com’s hosted solution model offers rapid deployment and simplified administration, making the solution more cost-efficient and IT-friendly.

Additionally, the company’s modular applications and flexible licensing packages allow companies of all sizes to use – and pay for – only what they need.

The Salesforce.com solution is available as a set of separately-licensed modules for sales force automation, partner relationship management, marketing automation, customer service and support, and business analytics. So, companies can pick and choose the applications they need. These solutions are all delivered via a robust, on-demand platform that can be fully customized to meet your company’s unique requirements, and seamlessly integrated within your existing technology environment.

Salesforce.com offers several flexible user license packages, based on the size of your business, and the level of functionality required:

* The Team Edition allows users to efficiently manage prospects and accounts, and share activity data and related information with other users.
* The Professional Edition provides comprehensive CRM functionality that allows companies to obtain visibility into the entire customer lifecycle.
* The Enterprise Edition gives larger, multi-faceted organizations a fully-customized CRM solution that coordinates and streamlines customer-facing processes across the enterprise.
* The Unlimited Edition offers unmatched flexibility by providing unlimited access to all Salesforce.com services, applications, tools, and components.

Whether your business has five users or fifty thousand, whether you need end-to-end CRM or just simple sales force automation, Salesforce.com has a powerful, yet cost-effective solution for you.